Peer Review Practice and Blog Posts

In preparation for future peer reviews, and to help you through the Summary/Response revision process, we will be conducting practice runs via the D2L Discussion board.  I have place you all into groups and have asked you (in class) to post one of the essays you have submitted to the Dropboxes to your group's discussion forum.  Please choose one of your group member's essays to read and review.

After you have read your peer's essay, reply to his/her post with feedback for how they can improve the piece.  You can use the descriptive or prescriptive method when responding, but please avoid simply saying "I liked this," or "I didn't like this."  If something is or isn't working in your peer's paper, be specific about how they do or don't work.

• Descriptive method: identifying what the writer is doing in his/her piece and discussing the payoffs and pitfalls of those choices.
• Prescriptive method: telling the writer what needs to be changed or left alone and providing your reasons.

For the in-class writing, I asked you all to respond to the question, "What did you take away from the Tim O'Brien essay?"  You can go any direction you'd like with this question, but try to write for about 15 minutes when responding.

Also, I have uploaded a document to D2L that consists of questions to consider when responding to a text.  Please feel free to reference this document, as well as pages 70-83 in the Rules for Writers handbook, when working on your Summary/Response paper.